See 13 sites, from Rockford to Springfield, along the Frank Lloyd Wright trail

The state's new Frank Lloyd Wright trail has 13 properties designed by the legendary architect.

Lori RacklChicago Tribune

Arguably the world’s first starchitect, Frank Lloyd Wright amassed a portfolio as thick as a phone book over a career spanning seven decades.

His groundbreaking work — both literally and figuratively — spawned more than 500 buildings, including mega hits like Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum. The designs of this southern Wisconsin native cropped up across 36 states and as far away as Japan.

But the man whom many hail as The Greatest American Architect Ever is inextricably linked to Illinois, where a new tourism trail showcases Wright’s handiwork in the Prairie State. Plans for the trail, made up of 13 Wright sites open to the public, will be formally unveiled by Illinois Office of Tourism Director Cory Jobe at 10 a.m. Monday at the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in Oak Park.

“The idea is to get visitors excited about Frank Lloyd Wright architecture and get them moving from point A to point B, with the ultimate goal of having them spend more dollars in Illinois and putting heads in the beds of our communities,” Jobe said in a phone interview.

Wright fans can go to the state’s tourism website, EnjoyIllinois.com, to find self-guided itineraries pegged to the trail, such as a 110-mile road trip from Chicago to Rockford, with stops in Oak Park, Geneva, Hampshire and Belvidere. Another option charts a roughly 240-mile journey from Chicago to Springfield, dropping by Oak Park, Kankakee and Dwight before culminating in the capital.

The itineraries include suggestions for nearby attractions, some of which aren’t Wright-related, like the newly renovated governor’s mansion in Springfield that’s slated to reopen for public tours in mid-July. In Kankakee, tourists who visit the Bradley House — one of the 13 stops on the trail — are also urged to check out the Wright-inspired murals downtown.

The trail will be marked by brown signs with a white font and geometric design reminiscent of Wright. The Illinois Department of Transportation is supposed to install the 2-by-2-foot signs “later this summer,” Jobe said. He added that the rollout of the trail is a bid to build on the momentum of last year, when the highly publicized 150th anniversary of Wright’s birth sparked a renewed focus on the man who died in Arizona in 1959, a few weeks shy of 92.

“Interest in Frank Lloyd Wright seems to be growing, and the trail will be an even greater incentive for people to come to Illinois,” said Celeste Adams, president and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust. The trust owns the Oak Park home and studio where a young Wright began making a name for himself and pioneered the distinctly American Prairie style of architecture.

The trust also operates tours at four other Wright sites in the Chicago area, a region that boasts more Wright buildings than anywhere in the world. The four sites that partner with the trust are all part of the new trail: Robie House in Hyde Park, Emil Bach House in Rogers Park, the recently renovated Unity Temple in Oak Park and the Rookery building, where Wright designed the famed light court inside this Burnham and Root structure, one of the city’s first skyscrapers.

Collectively, the properties saw more than 115,000 visitors last year, many from outside the country, Adams said. Canada made up the biggest percentage of the international audience at 26 percent, followed by Australia (17 percent) and the U.K. (10 percent). Among domestic visitors, it’s no surprise that Illinois led the pack at 43 percent, with California and New York tied at a distant 7 percent.

Wisconsin tourism officials report a jump in visitor numbers after the state launched its own Wright trail last year. Made up of nine key sites, the crown jewel of the 200-mile trail is Taliesin, the home, studio and school Wright built on a sprawling estate near Spring Green. Taliesin is also where the scandal-prone architect’s mistress was murdered, along with six others, by an ax-wielding servant who set fire to the house while Wright was in Chicago working on the now-defunct Midway Gardens.

Visits to Taliesin were up 20 percent from 2016 to 2017, said Wisconsin Tourism Secretary Stephanie Klett. “We knew there’d be a lot of folks from the upper Midwest who’d be interested in (the trail), but the people coming in from down South and the coasts has really surprised us.”

Like Wisconsin’s, the Illinois version features a range of Wright’s works, including a bank in Dwight where visitors can pop in and have a look during business hours. A small chapel in Belvidere Cemetery marks another stop. A cemetery official said it’s best to visit between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Monday through Friday; the 1906 chapel is usually locked, but someone will open it for you if you call 815-547-7642 about an hour in advance.

On the banks of the Kankakee River, you can tour one of Wright’s earliest Prairie-style creations, the Bradley House. Built in 1900, the low-pitched roof, bands of casement windows, extended eaves and ground-hugging design all emphasize the horizontal, mirroring the wide-open Midwest prairies that were the muse for much of Wright’s architecture.

Other points on the trail are the Muirhead Farmhouse, formerly a bed and breakfast, in Hampshire, and another farmhouse — this one transformed by Wright in 1907 into Fabyan Villa — in Geneva.

Have fun deciphering Wright’s fingerprints versus those of his mentor, Louis Sullivan, in the design details of another trail site, the Charnley-Persky House, which the architects worked on together in Chicago’s Gold Coast. The home on Astor Street is now the headquarters for the Society of Architectural Historians.

Also on the trail is the Dana-Thomas House in Springfield. The socialite who commissioned it gave Wright a blank check, and the infamous spendthrift ran with it. The huge home feels like a furniture showroom for Wright-designed pieces and stunning art glass. Unlike several properties on the trail, admission to the state-run Dana-Thomas House is free.

The northern-most tip of the trail reaches up to Rockford, where you’ll find the Laurent House (1949), the only home Wright designed specifically for someone with a physical disability. (World War II veteran Kenneth Laurent needed a wheelchair to get around.) What’s also notable about this single-story abode built on a concrete slab: It’s one of Wright’s Usonian designs, a simplified, highly practical style of home aimed at Americans whose pockets weren’t as deep as those of Wright’s high-profile clients.

Rockford is less than 20 miles south of the border with Wisconsin, where the tourism chief said she isn’t worried about Illinois stealing her state’s Wright thunder. Quite the opposite.

“I think it’s going to boost visitation in both states,” Klett said about Illinois’ Wright trail, whose brown signs are modeled after the ones in Wisconsin.

“Illinois, especially northern Illinois, has so many great Frank Lloyd Wright sites to explore, and a couple hours away, you have his birth home in Wisconsin,” she added. “Visitors don’t see state lines or boundaries. This just enhances the pilgrimage for people who love Frank Lloyd Wright.”